We are delighted to announce the winner of the WHN Book Prize for 2023 and 2024 (the two years were amalgamated). The judges chose Charmian Mansell’s book Female Servants in Early Modern England published by Liverpool University Press which wins the prize of £500.

The judges commented:

This impressive first book draws on a large dataset of church court testimonies to reconstruct the everyday lives of women in service in early modern England. Each chapter conveys vivid details of their daily labours, contracts of work, social networks and intimate lives, using sophisticated quantitative methodologies and close reading of individual testimonies. The findings interrogate long-standing assumptions about the domesticity and constraints of women’s lives in lifecycle service, and throughout, a nuanced set of arguments put these distinctively female experiences in dialogue with the pervasive structures of patriarchy, and the agency with which women negotiated them. Highly readable and engaging, we were delighted to award it the prize.

Many thanks to our judging panel: Virginia Davis; Lucy Delap (Chair); Laura Gowing; Lyndsey Jenkins

Highly commended and receiving a prize of £150 was Melanie Holihead, Naval Seamen’s Women in Nineteenth Century Britain published by Boydell and Brewer.

Details of the 2025 WHN Book prize may be found here.